As is well known in the art, biometric features currently used for authentication purposes in a biometric authentication system include fingerprints, facial patterns, voice patterns, hand measurements, eye retinas and irises, vein patterns and the like, and researches and studies on each of these features have been actively conducted.
In recent years, biometric authentication has been adopted for portable electronic devices such as smartphones and the like, and fingerprint authentication has been widely adopted among various types of biometric authentication for such portable electronic devices. The fingerprint authentication has advantages of high security level and usability compared to other biometric authentication techniques.
However, a fingerprint sensor installed in the portable electronic device such as smartphones is very small in size due to cost savings and space limitations, and therefore, only a very small portion of a fingerprint may be inputted at a time.
As the fingerprint sensor becomes smaller, the size of the fingerprint images captured for authentication purpose and registration purpose also becomes smaller, so that the amount of fingerprint information is also reduced. Further, a portion of the fingerprint inputted when registering in advance the fingerprint data for authentication procedure and a portion of the fingerprint inputted when the authentication is requested may be completely different from each other. Thus, it may often occur in practice that a fingerprint overlap area does not exist.
In order to solve the above-described problems, there is an approach that not only a plurality of fingerprint data for different portions of the fingerprint are registered and stored when registering in advance the fingerprint data to be used for the authentication procedure, but also a security level is adjusted by lowering a threshold for determining a success or a failure of authentication. For example, as for an access control system requiring high security, a relatively high security level is set to have a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 1/100,000,000. However, as for a smartphone in which a fingerprint authentication is mainly applied to a screen unlock function, a relatively low security level is set to have the FAR of 1/50,000.
Meanwhile, in recent years, the portable electronic device such as a smartphone or the like has not been used only for a single function such as making a phone call, but has been used for various purposes, especially in a financial field such as a mobile banking which requires a much higher security level.
However, the conventional fingerprint recognition techniques employed in the portable electronic device such as the smartphone or the like are operated by appropriately lowering the FAR for the user not to feel uncomfortable. This may be problematic because the security performance is too low for the financial field such as the mobile banking.
Reference Document: Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2015-0080736
In view of the above, aspects of the present disclosure provide a method and a device for fingerprint authentication, which are capable of performing the fingerprint authentication by using partial fingerprint measurement data corresponding to a part of the entire fingerprint while adjusting a security level of the fingerprint authentication.
However, aspects of the present disclosure are not restricted to those set forth herein. The above and other aspects of the present disclosure will become more apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art to which the present disclosure pertains by referencing the detailed description of the present disclosure given below.